For thirty years, the click has been the fundamental unit of the internet. It is how attention moves. How traffic flows. How content earns its keep. The hyperlink—and the click that activates it—is the architecture of the open web. It's such an elemental part of how we experience the internet that most people have never stopped to think about it as an infrastructure decision. But it is one. And it's being dismantled.
Artificial intelligence is eliminating the click. Not deliberately, not through any single decision, but as the cumulative effect of systems designed to answer questions directly, to synthesise, to summarise. To remove friction. To be, above all, useful. And they are useful—genuinely, usefully useful in a way that I find myself appreciating every day. The problem isn't the usefulness. It's what the usefulness is costing.
Efficiency is a reasonable goal until you realise that the friction you removed was also the mechanism by which value was distributed across the web. The click wasn't just user behaviour. It was the economic blood supply of the open internet.
Why Users Stop Clicking
When you ask an AI assistant a question, you receive an answer—complete, fluent, and authoritative-sounding—without visiting any of the sources that inform it. When you search on Google now, an AI Overview sits above the results, synthesising the answer for you. The links remain, but the incentive to click them has been subtly but fundamentally undermined. Research by SparkToro found that over 60% of Google searches now end without a click—the user gets what they need from the search page itself and moves on. That figure has been rising steadily for years and has accelerated significantly with the introduction of AI Overviews.
This is more convenient. For users in the moment, it is genuinely better. But systems optimised for individual user experience in the short term have a way of destroying the ecosystem that made that experience possible in the first place. The answer the AI is synthesising came from somewhere. That somewhere runs on advertising revenue generated by clicks. Remove the clicks, remove the revenue, remove the incentive to produce the content the AI is summarising. Follow that chain to its conclusion.
What Disappears When Clicks Die
Publishers monetise attention through traffic. Creators build audiences through discovery. Independent journalists, niche writers, specialist blogs—the entire long tail of the open web—depends on the simple mechanism of someone clicking a link and arriving somewhere new.
We're already seeing the consequences. Vice Media, once valued at $5.7 billion, filed for bankruptcy in 2023 in part because of collapsing referral traffic. BuzzFeed shuttered its entire news division. Hundreds of local news outlets have closed, replaced by nothing. These aren't just business failures—they're the systematic defunding of the information ecosystem that AI is now feeding on. The AI gets smarter; the sources it learns from get poorer. It's a beautiful arrangement, if you're the AI company.
When AI mediates all discovery, the web doesn't disappear. It just stops mattering. The pages remain; the incentive to create them withers.
But there's a less-discussed cost that goes beyond economics. The click was also how the internet generated serendipity. You went looking for one thing and found another. A link took you somewhere unexpected. Curiosity had physical expression in a gesture. A rabbit hole was an adventure. In a world where AI mediates all discovery—synthesising, summarising, pre-empting the follow up question—the web becomes more efficient and less surprising. The experience narrows. That's not a trivial loss. Some of the most important things I've ever learned, I discovered by accident, following a link somewhere I hadn't planned to go.
The Advertising Consequence
For advertisers, the death of the click is equally disorienting. Search advertising—which depends on the user arriving somewhere after clicking—is under structural pressure. Google itself is responding by embedding advertising into AI Overviews: early tests show that even when AI answers appear at the top of search results, shopping ads still appear about 81% of the time, integrated so they look like a natural part of the answer. The line between organic information and paid promotion is blurring in ways that raise serious questions about disclosure and trust.
The transition is already beginning. Amazon has built a model that doesn't depend on the open web at all—it owns the shopping intent, the product information, and the payment infrastructure. TikTok Shop is doing something similar for social commerce. The click is dying in the open web sense, but it's migrating inward to closed ecosystems where the platform captures both the discovery and the conversion. For brands, the lesson is urgent: your digital presence cannot depend on being findable through search. It must be worth seeking out directly.
Who Survives?
In a post click world, content that exists only to be found will cease to be funded. What survives will be content valuable enough to be cited by AI, or content that lives within the walls of platforms that still control their own discovery mechanics—and content with a community around it that doesn't need to be discovered because it's actively sought. The newsletter, the podcast, the membership site, the direct relationship: these are the forms that endure because they route around the click dependency entirely.
The death of the click is not a product decision by any single company. It is the structural outcome of optimising for friction reduction without accounting for what friction was carrying. The question now is not whether it happens—it's already happening—but whether we build the alternative infrastructure before the one it's replacing has fully collapsed.
